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Wolfram Alpha isn't the "Google killer" that many hyped it up to be prior to its 2009 launch. Instead, the self-described computational knowledge engine takes a completely different approach to letting users find and analyze information. Rather than scouring the Web and ranking everybody's pages in the order it thinks we'd find them useful, it uses its own data sets and computational power to return detailed reports and analysis about whatever topics users query it for.

Tomorrow, the service will ramp things up a notch when its "pro" version launches. For $5 per month, Wolfram Alpha Pro will allow users to do way more with its data, as well as enable them to upload their own. The premium offering will be discounted for students and enterprise users.

Well, that didn't take long. Bing, Microsoft's three-year-old search engine, has officially edged out ahead of Yahoo, according to the latest data from ComScore. In December, Yahoo dropped 0.6 percentage points over the previous months, giving Microsoft a slight lead, despite the fact that Bing didn't grow that much during the same time period.

Bing now commands 15.1% of the search market, while Yahoo has dropped to 14.5%. It's not even a full percentage point, but this is the first time Yahoo has been ousted by Microsoft for that #2 slot behind Google.

Ending a month of speculation, Google has renewed its search exclusivity deal with Mozilla, who has long featured Google as the default browser on its Firefox Web browser.

When the deal expired in November, it gave rise to speculation that Google might not renew it, which would deprive Firefox of about 84% of its annual revenue. That possibility seemed bolstered by the fact that Google's Chrome was said to have recently ousted Firefox as the number two browser on the market. An end to the deal could have put the future of Firefox in jeopardy, although some thought the ominous predictions were overblown.

It's not even three years old yet, but Microsoft's Bing search engine now has about the same share of the market as Yahoo, which has been around since 1995. Bing hit 15% of the search engine market in November, according to ComScore. Yahoo had 15.1%.

Both sites trail far behind Google, which holds onto more than 65% of the market. While that position isn't threatened by any other search engine, it's interesting to note how quickly Bing has risen in the last few years.

American Web tech companies trying to gain a share of the massive Chinese market bend too easily to government authorities, who demand tighter censorship and self-policing on the Internet, say analysts in a new report.

Voluntary attempts to conform to government demands while maintaining the freedom of speech found in their originating culture, have proven unsuccessful for companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo, who have made the push into China and other rigidly-policed tech environments. The analysts say the problem is getting worse.

Trying to search for old tweets can be a pain. Twitter's own search engine brings back limited results and the top search engines like Google and Bing are so focused on real-time that trying to get something older than a couple of days is almost impossible. Often times you will find yourself scrolling through your timeline looking for that one tweet you sent months ago. If you tweet a lot, that is a giant hassle.

PostPo.st thinks that it has come up with the solution. When you sign up for the service PostPost will determine 200 of your most relevant follows and index up to 400 tweets for each user. If some of the people you follow are also PostPost users then nearly all of their tweets will indexed. PostPo.st attempts to be as comprehensive a Twitter search engine that exists today.

People are still getting used to Google Instant Search, the format that displays search results as you type. But the idea has captivated developers and inspired a growing number of search engines that let you preview the results without having to press enter.

You can now try Instant Search for Twitter, Bing, Wikipedia, Flickr or iTunes, or just head to the new site Instantise to find links to 16 instant search apps inspired by Google's innovation last week.

According to the latest data from analytics firm Hitwise, Ask managed to grow an astonishing 21% last month (from 2.84% to 3.44%), while Microsoft's Bing actually lost 1%. After a long period of slow but steady decline, the total number of U.S. searches on Yahoo grew about 3% last month, while Google lost about 1% and fell under 70%. Alternative search engines only accounted for 1.93% of all U.S. searches.

According to the latest data from comScore, Internet users over the age of 15 conducted over 29 million searches per minute in 2009. Overall, the global search market grew 46% in 2009. Unsurprisingly, Google continues to have a commanding lead in this market. Worldwide, Google accounted for 66% of all searches conducted in 2009 by Internet users over 15. Microsoft's search properties, including Bing, commanded only about 3% of the total market, but Microsoft also saw the greatest gain (70%) among the top 5 search properties. In total, comScore estimates that Internet users now conduct close to 131 billion searches per year.

As the year draws to an end, all the large search engines have now published their year-end roundups of the most popular search queries on their sites. On almost every service, these include Michael Jackson, Twitter, Lady Gaga and terms related to Twilight. Google also just released its annual Zeitgeist survey, which features lists of the fastest rising search terms on Google's properties worldwide. Among the top queries related to technology and the Web, Facebook (#2) leads the charge ahead of Twitter (#4) and Windows 7 (#8) in the global survey. In the US, Twitter was the fastest rising search term of 2009, followed by Michael Jackson, Facebook, Hulu and hi5.